Recently Stan Goff posted an article on Feral
Scholar that has generated a fair amount of
discussion. Nominally an explanation for his
retreat from sectarian politics, it touches on
the viability of Marxist theory. While I welcome
anybodys decision to withdraw from the world of
self-declared vanguard politics, I am a little
less comfortable with some of Stans broader
challenges to Marxism. Unfortunately, there is a
tendency to obscure the points of demarcation
between his own particular experience with
Freedom Road, other sectarian groups and Marxist
theory in general. I attribute this to a certain
tendency among Freedom Road comrades to adopt a
semiclandestine posture that was standard
operating procedure for Maoist groups in the
1970s. Lets take a look at the following
paragraph to get an idea of the sort of confusion that this leads to:
>>One of my primary disappointments has been
what I consider the failure to take seriously the
struggle against patriarchy, and to give it the
same weight in our organizing as we do class and
national oppression. There have been only token
efforts in this regard, and no serious initiative
that I have seen to go outside the canon to
understand this system. Worse, there has been a
reactive embrace of liberal-libertarian
feminism by many comrades
which I consider to
be a sly academic reassertion of male power in
the consumer-choice package of freedom,
undermining the whole analysis of gender as a
system. But this is not the crux of the issue for
me. Feminism was the gateway to a number of other
interrogations of the assumptions of organized Marxism.<<
Who are the many comrades referred to above?
Freedom Roaders? If so, why not refer to exactly
what kind of liberal-libertarian feminism
they have been espousing? Without a specific
reference, Stans complaint has a somewhat vaporous quality.
If the Freedom Roaders could be faulted on their
commitment to fighting patriarchy, at least Stan
gives them credit for pushing refoundation:
>>My own last association with organized Marxism
was with members whose work I greatly admire. In
particular, I was attracted to their analysis of
national oppression, which remains in advance of
most of the US left, and their stated committment
to refoundation of a politically efficacious left in the US.<<
For those who follow left politics, the term
refoundation might ring a bell. There is a party
in Italy called Communist Refoundation, which is
more or less of an attempt to build on
Eurocommunist initiatives of the 1970s and that
mixes together genuine militancy with the
traditional horse-trading that has tainted the Italian left since WWII.
The Freedom Roaders proposed their own kind of
refoundation in 2000, which amounted to a kind of
embrace of the same ideas that were being
promoted by Solidarity and Committees of
Correspondence, which in the 1950s was called
regroupment. It was an attempt to build a new
Marxist or radical left without the traditional
Leninist concepts that were actually alien to
the way that the Bolshevik party operated.
Although the left would have benefited from a new
party that included all of these various currents
opposed to sectarianism, their own habits and
inertia prevented them from coming together.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2006/12/02/stan-goff-rejects-marxism-a-reply/